What Sinn Féin delegates at yesterday’s ardfheis did was roughly comparable to a Marxist organisation deciding that the Koran is more relevant to today’s world than the ideas of the Communist Manifesto. Once upon a time you’d never have imagined it possible. The one thing you could rely on from any Provie was an uncompromising hatred of the British Army and the RUC/PSNI. In some bars the Queen song “Another one bites the dust” would be put on the jukebox when news came through of another dead cop or soldier. Tasteless, but understandable in the context. Though you couldn’t really pretend that it was done on the strength of a sophisticated analysis of the role of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state.

Ian Paisley made the most honest comment of the whole day. He said that Sinn Féin had been obliged to accept the police service under relentness DUP pressure. That is pressure from the largest far-right organisation in Britain or Ireland. Judging from the faces that were shown endorsing the leadership motion it looked like several fromer IRA members were wheeled out to lend their military credentials to the capitulation. Martin Mc Guinness banged the IRA drum over and over again wrongly claiming that the IRA had fought the British to a standstill. The opposite is true. The British had infiltrated the Republicans at every level and could contain them militarily with little trouble. If he wanted to ridicule the dissident Republicans he should not have done it for their lack of military competence but rather for defending the traditional programme of a movement that can only lead to defeats like this.

Sinn Féin – rapidly moving right

As part of the long preparation for yesterday’s move Sinn Féin have been saturating Republican areas with slickly designed displays like the one above in which they describe themselves as the revolutionary party. What’s the first thing you learn when you join a revolutionary party? It should be along the lines of “A state arises, a special power is created, special bodies of armed men, and every revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, shows us the naked class struggle.” When you explicitly endorse a regime’s police you cease to be revolutionary. One of the indications of Chavez’s revolutionary credentials is that he is creating alternative to the bourgeois armed organisations.

Sinn Féin is quickly moving to the right of the Irish political spectrum. While serving as education minister Martin Mc Guinness was having himself photographed handing over PFI cheques to nuns for their schools. There are three things wrong with a picture like that. In the Free State they want to be in coalition with the utterly bourgeois Fianna Fail. In the north they want to be in a power sharing government with the most reactionary mainstream party in Western Europe. How revolutionary is that? Later on this week I will do a survey of what the Irish far left has had to say on the matter. Since the majority of it favours the imperialist settlement and wants to get on with the “normal politics” of making deals with the union bureaucracy, pretending that the North isn’t really sectarian and ignoring imperialism it won’t be an uplifting read.